A Very Expensive Poison (26 page)

Walter blamed their misfortunes in exile on Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, whose close friendship with Putin was well known. The family’s claim for asylum was going nowhere. ‘We have fallen victim to a political game,’ he told me. Walter blamed Putin for Alexander’s death, reasoning to me that – as in Stalin’s times – only Putin could have authorised the murder. ‘I know it was Putin who killed him. He’s a sick person,’ Walter said.

Tatiana, however, refused to impugn Russia’s president. She bristled at the mention of Berezovsky. The oligarch had initially supported the Litvinenkos in exile, but had eventually stopped payments; his money had run out. Tatiana and her husband had good careers with the FSB in Nalchik, Litivnenko’s home town; the international scandal surrounding her brother had cost them everything. ‘He’s clearly not interested in us,’ she
said, of Berezovsky. ‘I wouldn’t stop to take money from him.’

The Litvinenkos – all eight of them, including two young children and Maxim’s wife – were living in a small three-bedroom flat. They were broke. A local church was donating bread and apples; they ate pancakes and prawns salvaged from the freezer of their former restaurant. Walter and his wife were both over seventy. It was clearly too late for them to start a new life. On the wall was a map of Russia and several Orthodox icons; I spotted an Italian–Russian dictionary on a bookshelf.

Walter and I went for a walk outside. He put on the same flat cap he’d worn to his son’s drizzly funeral at Highgate Cemetery in London back in December 2006. Since then he had urged the US congress to support a resolution that blamed the Russian government for Litvinenko’s death. A public role didn’t suit him. Walter was, it struck me, a broken figure – and a pitiful one. He was afraid. ‘In Nalchik I didn’t fear because I knew everybody’s faces. Here it is different. At any moment a person could come up to you and that would be the end.’

In signed statements, Walter listed persecution in various forms by the Russian state. The police had beaten him up, he wrote, in an attempt to force him to incriminate his son. For five years he’d held one person responsible for these woes: Putin. In May 2011, Tatiana called me with further bad news. Lyuba had died. The Italian government was still refusing basic income support. Walter had moved out, into a one-bedroom flat.
He was too poor to pay the electricity, so would sit on his own in the dark.

Then, in 2012, something very odd happened. Walter gave a tearful interview from Italy to Russian state TV. He told the Russian public: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, if you are watching this programme please forgive me for all the slander that I said and wrote about you.’ Walter said that he had come to understand that his son was a traitor. He wanted to go back home to Russia.

Walter ascribed his radical change of heart to encounters with an Orthodox priest from Rimini. In an affidavit, sworn in September 2012 before Russian officials, he said he now believed Lugovoi was innocent, and that polonium had been ‘skillfully placed’ to incriminate him. The real murderer, he suggested, was Alex Goldfarb.

It wasn’t difficult to piece together what lay behind Walter’s stagey recantation. The death of his second wife had devastated him; he’d been very attached to her; now, in the final years of his life, he felt lonely and overwhelmingly homesick. Moreover, Walter wanted to help his surviving son Maxim. After Walter’s TV confession, the family’s business affairs were said to have suddenly improved.

Astonishingly, Walter said he wanted to contact Lugovoi in Russia. Goldfarb likened the encounter – between a father and his son’s unrepentant killer – to a scene from Homer’s
Iliad
. ‘It has a proportion of drama akin to the Trojan War, with Priam and Achilles,’ Goldfarb said.

Priam was king of Troy; his son Paris caused the Trojan War by abducting Helen from the Greeks. The
Greeks fought a war to get her back. Their best warrior Achilles kills another of Priam’s sons, Hector. Achilles refuses to give back the body and so Priam goes to the Greek camp to plead with him for his dead son’s return. He invokes memories of Achilles’ own father and says: ‘I kiss the hand of the man who killed my son.’

In Goldfarb’s analogy, Walter is the ageing Priam, seeking out his son’s killer, Achilles/Lugovoi, to make peace with him in return for personal favours. Marina Litvinenko said her father-in-law surprised and disappointed her. Contact between them stopped. ‘I was very sad,’ she said.

It was once the government building in Donetsk. But in spring 2014 the city’s administrative HQ resembled a crazy Soviet theme park. Outside were barricades: a pile of tyres, razor wire and wooden crates. Stuck to them were banners with anti-western slogans. There were caricatures of Barack Obama. In one, Obama was dressed as Hitler, with a pencil moustache. In another, the US president was pictured next to Bonaparte and the Führer, and the words: ‘They all thought their nations were superior.’ In a third, Obama was a monkey.

Further inside, past a serpentine wall of debris, pro-Russian activist Vitaly Akulov stood under a Stalin flag. The Soviet leader had a Kalashnikov. He looked like a matinée idol. Wasn’t Stalin responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens? ‘Without a tough tsar who uses harsh methods you can’t build an imperium,’ Akulov replied. Other banners read: ‘Fuck EU and USA’, ‘Donbas with Russia’ and ‘Russians should be together’.

That April, pro-Kremlin separatists seized the regional administration building in Donetsk, a city of one million
people in eastern Ukraine. The activists hijacked a string of other buildings across the Donbas, Ukraine’s traditional industrial heartland. They took over town halls and police stations. And proclaimed two new political entities: the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’. The city of Luhansk – in the next-door region or
oblast
, with a population of 445,000 – was 20 miles (35 km) from the Russian border.

The rebels’ Donetsk HQ was an improvised youth hostel and centre for revolutionary operations. The eleven-storey block overlooked Pushkin Boulevard. Inside, I found a group of teenagers in balaclavas, some just fifteen or sixteen, and bearded, newly important, middle-aged men in military jackets. The Donetsk People’s Republic – or DNR – had taken over the top floor. To reach it you had to walk up a lot of stairs; the lifts didn’t work. Its leader, or ‘people’s governor’, was Denis Pushilin, a neatly dressed local businessman apparently picked by Moscow for the role.

The city police and security services had made little effort to stop this takeover. Indeed, they appeared to sympathise with it. A police car was parked outside; officers chatted happily to masked separatists. The separatists had commandeered another building opposite Donetsk’s art gallery. (It housed a portrait by Leonid Pasternak, the father of Boris, author of
Doctor Zhivago
, alongside nineteenth-century works by the ‘Wanderers’, my favourite Russian artistic movement.)

Forty miles (65 km) up the road north of Donetsk were signs that Ukraine’s sovereignty was fast disappearing.
A pro-Russian militia unit had taken over the town of Slavyansk. They were equipped with Kalashnikovs – military-issue AK-74s – commando knives, flak jackets and walkie-talkies. They arrived in a green military truck. It bore no insignia. Who exactly were they? ‘We’re Cossacks,’ one of the group explained, as he and his comrades – one in a traditional woolly Cossack hat – posed for photos outside Slavyansk’s town hall. The commander declined to give his name.

Instead he offered me a quick history lesson, stretching back a thousand years, to when Slavic tribes banded together to form Kievan Rus – the dynasty that eventually flourished into modern-day Ukraine and its big neighbour Russia. ‘We don’t want Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t exist for us. There are no people called Ukrainians,’ he declared. ‘There are just Slav people who used to be in Kievan Rus, before Jews like Trotsky divided us. We should all be together again.’

The man – a middle-aged commando with a bushy beard – said he had come to Slavyansk ‘to help’. He declined to say where he was from. ‘It doesn’t matter where we are from.’ He didn’t intend to kill anybody, he said. Producing a long knife, he said: ‘I can’t kill my brother Slavs.’ The mysterious Cossacks had been visiting Crimea, where they had ‘helped’ with the peninsula’s annexation. They disliked Jews but were now fighting ‘fascism’.

Ukraine’s new defence minister, Arsen Avakov, set a deadline for these enigmatic militia groups to give up their weapons. It came and went. On the road between Donetsk and Slavyansk, Ukraine’s elusive army was
nowhere to be seen. Poplars and colourful apricot trees with white blossom lined the highway; the route passed crumbling collective farms and old ladies selling local produce, including jars of birch juice and saplings.

Pro-Russian groups set up roadblocks heaped with black tyres. Masked youths, mostly armed with sticks, stopped and checked cars. Closer to Slavyansk the barricades got bigger. The route and main checkpoint led over a bridge. Halfway across was an extraordinary sight: a group of women, mostly elderly, stood in a line holding gold-framed icons, praying and bowing.

It was hard to tell whether the Cossacks were a serious military force or a sort of colourful grenade-wielding theatre troupe, made for Russian TV propaganda. The central government in Kiev responded by dispatching a convoy of six armoured personnel carriers (APCs). It turned up in Kramatorsk, 10 miles (16 km) south of Slavyansk. Other Ukrainian soldiers were holed up in a nearby aerodrome.

A crowd surrounded the column, then armed men in fatigues. Without firing a shot, they persuaded the terrified Ukrainian servicemen to yield their vehicles. The gunmen sat on top of them. Someone raised a Russian tricolour. Around 200 people cheered and took photos. The men drove off. The column rattled past Kramatorsk’s train station and turned right over a steep dusty bridge, belching clouds of diesel smoke.

From close up, it was clear that these rebels were different from the amateur teenage volunteers camping out in Donetsk. They were professionals. They had
Kalashnikovs, flak jackets, ammunition. One even carried a green tube-shaped grenade-launcher. Where had they come from? Some hid their faces under black balaclavas. Others waved and smiled. All wore orange and black St George’s ribbons – the symbol of the Soviet victory in the Second World War over Hitler and fascism.

The column disappeared. It was easy to follow. I got into my vehicle and pursued a line of fresh white tread tracks left in the tarmac. The column drove serenely into Slavyansk, past its checkpoints, and parked round the back of the occupied city hall, next to the White Nights café. Locals seemed mystified. ‘I heard the sound of tanks approaching. I thought Ukrainian troops had arrived,’ Vladimir Ivanovich said. So who were the soldiers in masks? ‘I don’t know,’ he told me.

The mysterious armed men stood around in a small municipal park. It was sunny, a perfect spring morning. The captured APCs became the town’s newest, most unexpected tourist attraction. Teenage girls posed with the masked gunmen. Small children lined up for photos as well. The atmosphere was calm, one of military order. The town hall had been meticulously sandbagged. Sniper points had sprung up on the roof.

I asked one of the masked men where his unit had come from.

He said: ‘Crimea.’

Crimea was Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula, now under new Russian ownership. Vladimir Putin had annexed it the previous month. It had already been home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet and to thousands of Russian
military personnel. And it was several hundreds of miles away. It appeared the gunman and his unit had managed to infiltrate across the Russian–Ukrainian border. Now they were in Slavyansk.

How were things back in Crimea?

‘
Zamechatelno
,’ he replied in Russian – terrific, splendid. ‘The old ladies are happy. Because of Russia their pensions have doubled.’

Where was he from originally? Ukraine? Somewhere else?

‘I’m from Russia,’ the soldier said.

Days later, the kidnappings and murders started. Those taken hostage included a group of international observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe; journalists, Ukrainian and western; and others suspected of pro-Kiev views. If Russia was a mafia state, the DNR, it appeared, was a mafia statelet.

A local councillor, Vladimir Rybak, confronted DNR supporters who had taken over the town hall in neighbouring Gorlovka. As he left the square, four men in masks and military fatigues grabbed him and bundled him into a Kia car. Three days later, his battered body was found in Slavyansk next to a river. He’d been tortured. There were stab marks on his stomach and bruising on his chest. His kidnappers had tied a sandbag to his body. While he was unconscious they drowned him.

The conflict that gripped Ukraine in 2014 wasn’t, as Moscow would claim, a civil war. It was, in reality, a Frankenstein-like conflict, created by the Russian government
artificially and given life by the brute external shock of military force and invasion.

Many of the themes that featured in Litvinenko’s murder were here again, played out on a bigger and more terrible canvas. There was the use of violent methods to achieve political goals. As in his previous war in Chechnya, Russia’s president seemed entirely indifferent to the cost in human lives. This was true both of Ukrainian civilians who were the war’s main victims, and of Putin’s own soldiers, whose deaths in conflict he refused to acknowledge.

The Kremlin had lied about Litvinenko’s assassination; now it was lying about its role in a major war in Europe. The Russian military supplied the hardware used by the rebels: tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery pieces. Russian soldiers – sometimes repackaged as ‘volunteers’ – did much of the fighting. When it appeared the rebels were on the brink of defeat, Moscow used its regular units to crush Ukrainian forces.

Without Russia there wouldn’t have been a war in 2014. There would undoubtedly have been tension between the central government in Kiev and its predominantly Russian eastern regions – a political dispute about autonomy, devolved powers, and the status of the Russian language. But Ukraine wouldn’t have fallen apart. Fewer people would have died.

Months earlier, a pro-western revolution had taken place in the capital Kiev. It began as a spontaneous grass-roots movement. It sought to employ democratic methods and peaceful protest. It looked like other global
uprisings in New York or Paris or London. There were tent encampments in the centre of Kiev, rallies, speeches and flags. It only turned violent following a brutal government clampdown.

The counter-revolution that took place in eastern Ukraine soon afterwards was different. For sure, it enjoyed some popular support. But this was in essence a top-down army and intelligence operation, coordinated from next door by Russia. It soon morphed into a full-scale covert Russian invasion. The first revolution happened by accident; its antithesis was the result of a carefully curated plan that might have come – and probably did come – from a KGB textbook.

In November 2013, a well-known Kiev journalist, Mustafa Nayem, posted a question on Facebook. Earlier that day, Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych had announced he was dumping his country’s preparations to sign an association agreement with the European Union. The agreement had been long awaited. Instead, Yanukovych said he was turning to Russia. He said Moscow had offered Kiev a $15 billion loan.

Nayem – an investigative reporter born in Afghanistan – wrote on his Facebook page: was anyone planning to go to the Maidan? The Maidan is downtown Kiev’s central square and the scene of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. ‘In one hour my post had more than 1,000 “likes”,’ Nayem said. ‘That night 400 people showed up. They stayed until 6 a.m. Most of them were my friends from Facebook. It was the so-called creative class,’ he told me.

The demonstrators understood what Yanukovych’s decision meant: that the president had abandoned the idea of closer integration with the west. Instead, Ukraine would remain part of Russian political and economic space – with key decisions over the country’s future and foreign policy taken, in effect, by the Kremlin. Yanukovych would be Putin’s provincial viceroy. The loan was a bribe.

For the opposition, this vision of Ukraine’s future was unappealing. It came on top of four years of misrule, during which the president, his family and cronies had robbed the state. Corruption was nothing new in Ukraine; the country of 46 million had always had lousy leadership.

But after winning elections in 2010, Yanukovych divided the nation’s assets among his immediate relatives. He built himself a palace on the outskirts of Kiev, Mezhyhirya, complete with a helipad, golf course, pirateship restaurant and a zoo. Sadly, his kangaroos failed to survive the Ukrainian winter.

Yanukovych also dismantled the democratic reforms carried out post-2004. He jailed his chief political rival Yulia Tymoshenko, whose chaotic term as prime minister contributed to Ukraine’s economic and governance mess. Yanukovych suborned parliament and the courts. Political repression grew. He pursued a policy of Russification, which alienated many in the west of the country and fuelled the growth of radical Ukrainian nationalism.

Nayem’s Maidan protest went through several iterations. For weeks it was peaceful. Then, the government
used brutal force. This was counter-productive: the demonstrators grew. By February 2014, the mood in Kiev was angry and febrile. Prominent anti-government activists were disappearing; some turned up dead; others alive but showing signs of torture.
Titushki
– paid government thugs – roamed the streets, beating and killing. Crowds of protesters built barricades. The riot police fired teargas.

As the analyst Andrew Wilson put it, the uprising was a curious concoction of a revolution. It was the anti-Soviet rebellion that failed to happen when Ukraine got independence from the Soviet Union in 1991; a lot of Lenin statues were pulled down. It was also an Occupy-style protest and a Cossack rebellion. Much of it was strikingly retro. Protesters donned homemade shields and helmets. They hurled cobblestones and Molotov cocktails. There was a medieval-style catapult.

In the last hours of the regime, government snipers killed dozens. Video footage shows them firing on unarmed protesters trying to advance across open ground. Eleven police died too. Yanukovych was at his palace in the outskirts of Kiev. He was in no physical danger but chose to escape. He took $32 billion with him (having looted an estimated $100 billion in four years), leaving by helicopter and fleeing to Russia. Other members of his government ran away too, stuffing money and jewels in their hand luggage, like comedy gangsters.